A Curated Cacophony: Implementing an Intangible

<p>This research investigates a progression away from acoustics formed by spaces and towards spaces that are driven by target acoustics. Despite architecture and acoustics’ shared consideration of form, materiality and inhabitation, too often acoustics is neglected from design and so is treated remedially, nullifying creativity. A case study project was undertaken to investigate the opportunities and limitations of two parametric tools, Galapagos (a generative solver) and Pachyderm (an acoustic simulation tool), to develop acoustic qualities in early architectural design. Yet, what are these acoustic qualities and how could they be measured? Testing of cafes in the Wellington CBD was undertaken to investigate these questions. Six cafes were acoustically tested and five patrons from each of these completed a subjective survey. The café testing suggested that Reverberation Time (RT) could be an effective acoustic measure to direct architectural design. The café with the lowest patron enjoyment rating also recorded the longest RT and highest Sound Pressure Level (SPL), reinforcing the relationship between these three elements. Through these findings, patron enjoyment was concluded to be dependent on SPL and SPL was concluded to be dependent on RT (Whitlock and Dodd, 424). In order to increase patron enjoyment, Galapagos was utilised to explore possible forms that met a target design RT of 0.7 seconds. An RT of 0.7 seconds was chosen as it was shorter than the AS/NZS 2107 (2000) maximum and was comparable to the cafés with the two highest subjective enjoyment ratings. Through a parametric and analogue design methodology, Galapagos and Pachyderm were used to investigate how acoustic goals could shape a café design. The case study project produced a design that not only meets this acoustic criterion but harnesses form to sculpt sound. Instead of applying absorption to flat surfaces, the convex curves on the north and east facades disperse sound, producing both a diffuse environment and an engaging architectural element. This integrated investigation demonstrated that a parametric and analogue design process can be implemented to create a acoustically and architecturally effective design.</p>

A Curated Cacophony: Implementing an Intangible

<p>This research investigates a progression away from acoustics formed by spaces and towards spaces that are driven by target acoustics. Despite architecture and acoustics’ shared consideration of form, materiality and inhabitation, too often acoustics is neglected from design and so is treated remedially, nullifying creativity. A case study project was undertaken to investigate the opportunities and limitations of two parametric tools, Galapagos (a generative solver) and Pachyderm (an acoustic simulation tool), to develop acoustic qualities in early architectural design. Yet, what are these acoustic qualities and how could they be measured? Testing of cafes in the Wellington CBD was undertaken to investigate these questions. Six cafes were acoustically tested and five patrons from each of these completed a subjective survey. The café testing suggested that Reverberation Time (RT) could be an effective acoustic measure to direct architectural design. The café with the lowest patron enjoyment rating also recorded the longest RT and highest Sound Pressure Level (SPL), reinforcing the relationship between these three elements. Through these findings, patron enjoyment was concluded to be dependent on SPL and SPL was concluded to be dependent on RT (Whitlock and Dodd, 424). In order to increase patron enjoyment, Galapagos was utilised to explore possible forms that met a target design RT of 0.7 seconds. An RT of 0.7 seconds was chosen as it was shorter than the AS/NZS 2107 (2000) maximum and was comparable to the cafés with the two highest subjective enjoyment ratings. Through a parametric and analogue design methodology, Galapagos and Pachyderm were used to investigate how acoustic goals could shape a café design. The case study project produced a design that not only meets this acoustic criterion but harnesses form to sculpt sound. Instead of applying absorption to flat surfaces, the convex curves on the north and east facades disperse sound, producing both a diffuse environment and an engaging architectural element. This integrated investigation demonstrated that a parametric and analogue design process can be implemented to create a acoustically and architecturally effective design.</p>

Perimeter Approximation of Convex Discs in the Hyperbolic Plane and on the Sphere

Eggleston (Approximation to plane convex curves. I. Dowker-type theorems. Proc. Lond. Math. Soc. 7, 351–377 (1957)) proved that in the Euclidean plane the best approximating convex n-gon to a convex disc K is always inscribed in K if we measure the distance by perimeter deviation. We prove that the analogue of Eggleston’s statement holds in the hyperbolic plane, and we give an example showing that it fails on the sphere.

A robotic grasping approach with elliptical cone-based potential fields under disturbed scenes

Vision-based grasping plays an important role in the robot providing better services. It is still challenging under disturbed scenes, where the target object cannot be directly grasped constrained by the interferences from other objects. In this article, a robotic grasping approach with firstly moving the interference objects is proposed based on elliptical cone-based potential fields. Single-shot multibox detector (SSD) is adopted to detect objects, and considering the scene complexity, Euclidean cluster is also employed to obtain the objects without being trained by SSD. And then, we acquire the vertical projection of the point cloud for each object. Considering that different objects have different shapes with respective orientation, the vertical projection is executed along its major axis acquired by the principal component analysis. On this basis, the minimum projected envelope rectangle of each object is obtained. To construct continuous potential field functions, an elliptical-based functional representation is introduced due to the better matching degree of the ellipse with the envelope rectangle among continuous closed convex curves. Guided by the design principles, including continuity, same-eccentricity equivalence, and monotonicity, the potential fields based on elliptical cone are designed. The current interference object to be grasped generates an attractive field, whereas other objects correspond to repulsive ones, and their resultant field is used to solve the best placement of the current interference object. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is verified by experiments.